


The Musing Traveller

by Cold_Nostalgia



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Ficlet, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-14
Updated: 2010-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-12 16:22:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cold_Nostalgia/pseuds/Cold_Nostalgia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He cannot change his past</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Musing Traveller

If she'd been given the chance, a very dear friend might have asked him if regeneration was like waking up the next morning with a bad hangover and a hundred regrets. The Doctor has no idea how he'd answer the question that would have been put to him so crudely.

He cannot change his past; there will always be things that he wishes he'd done differently. He is not the only individual in the universe to feel this way, guilt is an emotion shared by a majority of species throughout time and space, he is not unique in this regard.

The Doctor was not drunk yesterday; nor is he sober today. He wasn't broken or fixed. There is a new face, and a new set of behaviours and peculiarities to go along with it; but at the core he is who he always was.

The Time War changed him. How could it not?

For years he brooded, and then in a desperate need for some kind of belonging, he clung to the human race. He held them close, emulated their ways as if they were his own. In a misguided attempt to fill an aching void inside his chest, silence the doubts filling his mind, The Doctor tried to be something he was not.

It sent him down a path that only could have ended in disaster had he carried on.

The regeneration gave him distance from a destructive mentality, nothing more, nothing less.

The Doctor is the last of an ancient race that once ruled the cosmos. Once he was an old man who stole his granddaughter away to travel the stars and see its wonders. He was never a god.

The Time War took more from him than he could have imagined, the wound that it left in its wake will always be apart of him, but The Doctor cannot let it define him anymore. He owes it to all those who have known him and all those lost to him to stand steadfast in his convictions.

He is The Doctor. A Healer. An Explorer. A Seeker of knowledge.

Nothing more and nothing less.


End file.
